A Tortoise inclosed in Ice

A Two-headed Tortoise.

The genome of a tortoise

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The last tortoise

The UN used World Environment Day earlier this month to launch a report highlighting the problems facing the conservation and management of biodiversity in the face of the many assaults humans are making on the natural environment. The report — Dead Planet, Living Planet; Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration for Sustainable Development — highlights not only the preservation of natural ecosyst...

Is Gopherus agassizii a Desert-Adapted Tortoise, or an Exaptive Opportunist? Implications for Tortoise Conservation

– The desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) has traditionally been viewed as an archetypal desert-adapted vertebrate. However, evidence from historical ecology, phylogenetics, anatomy, physiology, and biogeography qualifies this view significantly. Ancestors of G. agassizii stabilized as an essentially modern morph some 17-19 million yrs ago ago, perhaps 12 million yrs before the formation of ma...

Ancient tortoise hunting in the southwest Pacific

We report the unprecedented Lapita exploitation and subsequent extinction of large megafauna tortoises (?Meiolania damelipi) on tropical islands during the late Holocene over a 281,000 km2 region of the southwest Pacific spanning from the Vanuatu archipelago to Viti Levu in Fiji. Zooarchaeological analyses have identified seven early archaeological sites with the remains of this distinctive hor...